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The Politics of Personalized News Aggregation

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  • Lin Hu
  • Anqi Li
  • Ilya Segal

Abstract

We study how personalized news aggregation for rationally inattentive voters (NARI) affects policy polarization and public opinion. In a two-candidate electoral competition model, an attention-maximizing infomediary aggregates source data about candidates' valence into easy-to-digest news. Voters decide whether to consume news, trading off the expected gain from improved expressive voting against the attention cost. NARI generates policy polarization even if candidates are office-motivated. Personalized news aggregation makes extreme voters the disciplining entity of policy polarization, and the skewness of their signals is crucial for sustaining a high degree of policy polarization in equilibrium. Analysis of disciplining voters yields insights into the equilibrium and welfare consequences of regulating infomediaries.

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  • Lin Hu & Anqi Li & Ilya Segal, 2019. "The Politics of Personalized News Aggregation," Papers 1910.11405, arXiv.org, revised Nov 2022.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:1910.11405
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    3. Vladimír Novák & Andrei Matveenko & Silvio Ravaioli, 2024. "The Status Quo and Belief Polarization of Inattentive Agents: Theory and Experiment," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 16(4), pages 1-39, November.

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